Playing – Blades in the Dark

My regular Blades in the Dark game has been on hold due to school / work / life in general, but I got asked to do a one shot for a friend’s birthday. I wrote up a game pitch and settled upon an epic instrumental for the opening scene and intro …

House Rules I Used

Start with a Trauma and an extra Playbook Ability

– It can take a couple of sessions before anyone cracks into a Trauma and that really robs players of an opportunity for XP, particularly for a one shot and limited play. Likewise to get a feel for playbooks, I wanted them to have an additional cool thing to use like in Scum & Villainy where they start with two.

Allow Stressing Out (taken from Deep Cuts)

– This really appeals to me. Pulling a PC from the game when they have burned their last Stress was never something I liked. Allowing them to spend all their Stress and still be in the game kept all the players engaged, with the addition bonus of picking up a Trauma along the way.

Adding Dice Instead of Extra Effect

– The aspect of Extra Effect has been one of the more challenging mechanics for many of my players, further frustrated by often having the maximum Effect possible for the situation. Instead, when something could have been used for increasing the Effect, I offered them an extra dice as an option. If they had something that would help them like a contact or background or a piece of equipment that applied, I offered an extra die. It allowed for an smoother flow than a negotiation of Position / Risk / Rewards for every roll and encouraged players to engage with those aspects of their characters.

The Set Up

Wanting to give a full Blades experience, we went through the entire Crew Creation process, customize things (and explain some of the mechanics along the way), and set up some faction tension. My players being players, of course zagged while I had prepared for a couple of zigs, not going with the plug and play of Thieves or Bravos but instead went with Smugglers. My usual prep is to come up with three jobs of different flavors and remix them as needed to meet the player interests. I pulled a fourth random one from the Smuggler Job Chart while on a quick pizza break – interfere with the shipment of an art object, replace the object with something humiliating, and some bonus coin if they grabbed the original for a rival of the object’s owner.

The Crew went for that one, but there was complaint that there hadn’t been a proper smuggling job offered. I can admit that I wasn’t prepared for setting up checkpoints and customs inspections and juggling what sort of trade routes could be exploited, though in my Scum & Villainy game I had tried a few things but the job was still mostly getting something into or out of a restricted location and the streets of Duskvol just weren’t restricted enough from my point of view. Best advice I came across for smuggling – focus on the exciting parts of the transport and montage the rest. I’ve since added some more fleshed out smuggling scenarios to have in my back pocket for next time.

The Aftermath

Again seeking a full Blades experience, we went through the Downtime (including options I had lifted from Deep Cuts, including automatically healing Light Wounds and Make Work for some extra Coin) and included a Post Credit scene of the substituted artwork being unveiled to a ballroom of nobles stunned into silence, at least one swooning into a faint at the scandal and another tilting their head in an awkward manner as if contemplating the physical improbability of the model’s pose and action.

The players had fun and agreed that they would be willing to play again, including one player who had never done an RPG that hadn’t been a videogame (Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and a few others). They really enjoyed the little flourishes that they had brought into the word, like their bookshop lair and the bath houses to meet contacts and indulge in vice.